Aliro Vendor Scorecard: Who Ships, Who Promises, and What a Home Assistant House Can Buy Today

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The Connectivity Standards Alliance published a member video on 25 August 2026 called Alliance Members on Building the Future of Access with Aliro. Nearly 200 member companies since 2022, the page says. Apple, ASSA ABLOY, Google, Infineon, Last Lock, Samsung, STMicroelectronics. Good company. None of them are quoted saying what they will sell you, or when.

So I went and checked, company by company. I don't own an Aliro lock; my front door is on a keyed cylinder, my alarm is a wired Satel panel, and the only radio my Home Assistant box talks to is a Zigbee coordinator on a Connect ZBT-1. That means nothing below is hands-on. Every claim is attributed to the vendor or the outlet that made it, and where the vendor's own wording is slippery, I quote the wording.

Bottom line: As of mid-September 2026, three Aliro-flavoured products ship: the Aqara U400, the Schlage Sense Pro, and the Nuki Keypad 2 NFC. Only the Nuki keypad is reported as certified. Samsung Wallet is the one phone platform with a live Aliro key on a consumer lock. Google Wallet and Apple are commitments, not features. Buy for the radio the lock has today, not the wallet it promises next quarter.

What Aliro 1.0 Actually Standardised

Aliro 1.0 was released on 26 February 2026. The CSA's own announcement describes one credential format and one communication protocol across three transports: NFC for tap-to-unlock, Bluetooth LE for user-initiated unlock at range, and Bluetooth LE plus UWB for hands-free unlock as you walk up. The credential lives in a phone wallet and is verified with asymmetric cryptography, so the lock never holds a shared secret that a stolen phone could leak.

Two things in that announcement matter more than the transport list. First, certification runs through Authorized Test Labs, the same model Matter uses, which is why "Aliro certified" is a stronger claim than "Aliro ready". Second, the alliance named the companies it expected to certify first: Apple, Allegion, Aqara, Google, HID, Kastle, Kwikset, Last Lock, Nordic Semiconductor, Nuki, NXP, Qorvo, Samsung and STMicroelectronics. That is a prediction, not a product list. Seven months on, how much of it has turned into hardware?

The day after the release, Nelson Henry, the Aliro Steering Committee chair and VP of Security Technology and Engineering at Last Lock, told Security Info Watch to watch "who is moving to support at each critical role based on statements, announcements, and behaviors" rather than wait for dates. Fair enough. That is exactly what the rest of this piece does.

The Locks: Three Ship, Everyone Else Is a Slide

Aqara U400

Aqara announced the U400 at CES on 6 January 2026 as an Apple Home Key lock with UWB hands-free unlock, needing an iPhone 11 or later on iOS 18.5 and a Thread-capable Apple Home hub. On 2 March, Apple Home Authority reported it as the first lock to accept a Samsung Wallet Digital Home Key over Aliro NFC, provisioned through SmartThings. UWB hands-free for Galaxy phones was promised for the second quarter; I couldn't find a Samsung or Aqara post confirming it went live, so I'm treating that as still pending.

Aqara's phrase is "Aliro ready". Not certified. At least one comparison site lists the U400 as certified now, but a retailer's spec table isn't a test lab, and Aqara's own product page hadn't changed its wording when I checked. Price sits in the $250 to $300 band depending on finish and retailer. It's the most complete Aliro-adjacent lock you can buy, and it still needs an Apple hub or a SmartThings hub to get a key onto a phone.

Schlage Sense Pro

Schlage's launch release put the Sense Pro on sale 29 June 2026 at $399 in the US and $549 in Canada. It's Schlage's first Matter over Thread lock, has built-in Wi-Fi for remote access, does Apple Home Key with UWB at launch, and here is the sentence to memorise: the lock is "Aliro compatible and, once certified, is expected to support Aliro digital keys in Samsung Wallet and Google Wallet later this year".

Read that twice. A $399 lock from the biggest residential lock brand in North America shipped without the certification, and the two Android wallets are gated behind it. Allegion, Schlage's parent, has been in Aliro since the 2023 announcement. If they couldn't get certified for a June launch, that tells you how young the test-lab pipeline still is.

Nuki Keypad 2 NFC

This is the odd one, and the one I'd point at if someone asked which Aliro claim is cleanest. CE Pro reported on 25 March that the Nuki Keypad 2 NFC is one of the first Aliro-certified devices on the market, at $179. It isn't a lock. It's a keypad that pairs with any Matter-capable Nuki Smart Lock and accepts Apple Home Key, Samsung Digital Home Key, fingerprints and a PIN. Nuki showed an Aliro prototype at IFA 2025, so the timing fits.

Why does a keypad get certified before any deadbolt? Because a reader is a smaller, cheaper thing to put through a test lab than a whole lock with a motor, a Thread radio and a Wi-Fi stack. Expect that pattern to repeat: readers and retrofits first, integrated deadbolts later.

Everyone else

Kwikset appears on the CSA's expected-certifiers list; a couple of roundup sites say a Halo model is "getting updated with Aliro", and I found no Kwikset press release backing that. Yale and August, under ASSA ABLOY, were the first announced Aliro partner back in 2023 and have shipped nothing branded Aliro that I can find. SwitchBot and Xthings announced "Aliro-compatible" locks at CES. Level is quiet. Last Lock, whose VP chairs the steering committee, is a commercial reader company, not a consumer lock brand. Compare that list against my ranked smart lock picks and you'll notice how few of the well-reviewed locks of 2026 have any Aliro story at all.

• Shipping and reported certified: Nuki Keypad 2 NFC
• Shipping, "Aliro ready", Samsung NFC key live: Aqara U400
• Shipping, "Aliro compatible", Android wallets pending certification: Schlage Sense Pro
• Announced, no shipping Aliro SKU found: Kwikset, Yale, August, SwitchBot, Xthings, Level

The Phones: One Wallet Live, Two Commitments

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash.

A lock is half the transaction. The credential has to come from somewhere, and Aliro's whole premise is that it comes from the wallet app already on your phone. Here the scorecard is lopsided.

Samsung is the only platform with a consumer Aliro key in the wild. Matter Alpha's breakdown of Samsung Wallet Digital Home Key lays out the conditions: NFC tap needs Android 14 or newer on a wide range of Galaxy S, A and Z models; UWB hands-free needs Android 16 and the premium tier (S22 Plus and Ultra onward, Z Fold 4 onward). Two catches. Samsung says the current lock "requires Credential Provisioning through Matter, so it must be connected to Matter via the SmartThings Hub", and Samsung has "no plans to support" the Bluetooth LE transport at all. So a Galaxy key today means a SmartThings hub in the house and a lock on Matter.

Google announced Aliro support in Google Wallet with Play services 25.11 back in March 2025, NFC only, Android and Wear OS. Eighteen months later I cannot find a single consumer lock whose vendor says a Google Wallet Aliro key works today. Schlage says "later this year". That's the state of it.

Apple is the interesting absence. AppleInsider's launch-day piece called Aliro "an open version of Apple Home Key" and noted that Apple "will need to add support officially before a lock that supports only Aliro and not Home Key will work with Apple Home". Every shipping lock above talks to iPhones through Home Key, Apple's proprietary path. Apple is a founding member. It has said nothing about a version or a date.

Is that a problem for buyers? Only if you expected the standard to change your iPhone experience. It won't, not this year. What Aliro changes first is the Android side, where there was no Home Key equivalent at all.

The Silicon: Where the Real Shipping Happened

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash.

If the lock brands look slow, the chip vendors don't, and this is the layer that decides how many Aliro locks exist in 2027. A lock maker doesn't write an NFC credential stack from scratch. It buys a module with one already inside.

Nordic Semiconductor released a reference design for Aliro and Matter on its nRF54L series covering all three transports, with Aliro handling the key and Matter handling remote lock, user provisioning and ecosystem integration. Oyvind Strom, Nordic's EVP for short-range, called it "a complete, certified software solution that solves the integration of Aliro and Matter". Note the word certified: the silicon vendors are getting through the labs faster than the lock brands.

NXP has an Autonomous Secure Access design on the FRDM-MCXW71 board with its MCX W7x wireless MCU. STMicroelectronics has the ST64UWB for the ranging side, Qualcomm the FastConnect 8800. And on 16 July 2026 Espressif published an Aliro SDK for its Matter-enabled ESP32, ESP32-C, ESP32-S and ESP32-H parts, NFC today with Bluetooth LE and UWB "planned for a future release". That last one is the tell. When the $3 chip in every no-name lock on AliExpress gets an official Aliro stack, the flood of "Aliro compatible" products that follows will be exactly as trustworthy as the certification mark on the box, and no more.

Which brings up the Matter link most coverage skips. The Matter Door Lock cluster carries two feature bits for this: AliroProvisioning (the lock accepts Aliro credentials pushed by a Matter controller) and AliroBLEUWB (the lock supports the hands-free flow). That's why Samsung's key needs a SmartThings hub and Aqara's needs an Apple hub: the controller that commissions the lock over Matter is the one allowed to hand it a reader configuration. The wallet stores the key. The Matter controller is the gatekeeper.

What This Means for a Home Assistant House

That gatekeeper role is the whole reason a Home Assistant owner should care, even with no Aliro lock in the house. Whoever runs the Matter controller runs the door, and the same argument I made for keeping the control layer neutral applies with more force to a lock than to a lamp.

Home Assistant's position is on the record. The credential management roadmap issue lists Aliro support as a high-priority epic and says the project aims to be "the first Open Source platform to support it". Phase one shipped: the Matter lock manager in Home Assistant 2026.4 exposes PIN, RFID and fingerprint management through the Door Lock cluster, the same cluster Aliro provisioning rides on. What's missing is the wallet handshake, and that part isn't Home Assistant's to build; Apple, Google and Samsung decide who may push a key into their wallets.

So, practically, in September 2026:

• A Sense Pro or U400 pairs to Home Assistant over Matter, and Thread is the radio you want for that. My Thread network setup guide covers the border router decision, which matters here because the lock will also want to join Apple's or Samsung's Thread network for the wallet features. One mesh, credentials shared, or you'll be running two.
• Lock, unlock, battery, PIN management: yours in Home Assistant today.
• Phone-as-key: through Apple Home or SmartThings, not through Home Assistant, until the roadmap epic lands.

Would I buy one of these now? For a Home Assistant house, I'd still put a Z-Wave lock with S2 on the shortlist first, for the reasons in my Home Assistant lock picks: fully local, no second hub, no wallet dependency. Here's the opinion people will push back on: Aliro is more useful to Android households than to anyone running Home Assistant, because it fixes a problem (no Home Key on Android) that a local controller never had. If your family is all-Galaxy and you already own a SmartThings hub, the U400 is a real upgrade today. If you're the person who chose Home Assistant so that no vendor sits between you and your front door, the honest answer is that Aliro doesn't change your buy list yet. It changes it in 2027, when the roadmap epic ships and the second wave of certified deadbolts arrives on Nordic and Espressif silicon.

What should you actually watch? Not the CSA testimonial reel. Watch the certified-products directory, the Schlage firmware notes for the words "Samsung Wallet", and the Home Assistant release notes for the word "Aliro". Those three signals are the vendors' behaviour. Everything else is the video.